Current commercial warewash machines generally require intermittent downtime to drain, clean, and refill after a predetermined duration of operation to prevent poor wash quality, especially due to food soil redeposit, as well as to prolong the life of a machine. For the forgoing reasons, in some machines normal use requires an hour shutdown after every 2 hours of operation in order to drain, clean, refill and warm the machine in preparation for another 2 hours of machine operation.
However, this mode of cleaning is unfavorable given some very busy and high throughput kitchens which have very limited floor space to fit a higher throughput machine to meet the need. In most cases, these busy kitchens with small floor spaces fit smaller throughput machines and cannot afford the luxury of downtime after every 2 hour of operation for machine cleaning. These busy kitchens need machines or machine operations tailored to meet their needs.
Moreover, in some cases warewash machines that are only used intermittently for ware cleaning also follow the requirement of cleaning the machine after every 2 hours of operation. This procedure of cleaning the machine every 2 hours irrespective of the fact of only intermittent use for cleaning wares leads to waste of energy, chemicals, water and unnecessary downtimes in the case of such intermittently used machines.
U.S. Patent Publication No. 2008/0245394 discloses a warewash machine in which a main wash reservoir can be directly filled with clean water via a main cleaning line if great contamination in the main wash reservoir is detected. U.S. Patent Publication No. 2012/0298146 discloses that upon detection of high soiling within a tank of a warewash machine, the rinse flow rate can be increased in order to dilute the soiling. Although these systems are somewhat effective, improvements are continuously sought.
It would be desirable to provide a machine that incorporates machine cleaning notification characteristics and/or machine wash solution characteristics to reduce unnecessary downtime and save on energy, chemicals, and water by providing any improved in-situ dilution of tank water.